All of the actors in “Clybourne Park” play at least two roles: one in 1959 and another in 2009. But the show isn’t the only one to require its cast to do double duty. Micheal Davenport and Shawn Wilson will swap leading roles from one night to the next in Tallgrass Theatre’s upcoming production of Sam Shepard’s “True West,” about about a pair of estranged brothers — one a screenwriter, the other a thief — vying for the attention of a Hollywood producer. The show runs Jan. 31 through Feb. 15, with performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Rex Mathes Auditorium, 1401 Vine St. in West Des Moines. $15 in advance, $18 at the door. www.tallgrasstheatre.org

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In the two years since Bruce Norris’ “Clybourne Park” became the first play to win theater’s triple crown — the Pulitzer, Tony and Britain’s Olivier — it’s become one of the most produced plays among regional companies nation­wide.

And even though its raci­ally charged story happens to erupt in Chicago, audiences at this weekend’s Iowa premiere may recognize similarities to Des Moines’ Sherman Hill or River Bend or any other area that’s seen one group replace another. These days, even small-town Perry knows how that works.

“You just can’t get better material to work with,” said Todd Buchacker, who directs the StageWest production. “It’s one of those shows that’s funny because of the writing — it’s just inherently funny — but it makes you laugh in that sort of uncomfortable way as well, when you’re laughing at things you’re not supposed to laugh at.”

Both halves of the acerbic comedy are about a skirmish over the same ordinary house. In the first act, in 1959, a black family from Chicago’s south side has just bought the property and is ready to move in, over the objections of the lily-white neighborhood association.

In the second act, 50 years later, the house is in bad shape and the neighborhood is even worse, battered by decades of poverty, crime and neglect. The battle over inte­gration is ancient history, forgotten long before the last whites fled for the suburbs. But the area is changing again, and this time the roles are reversed: A young white couple wants to buy the house because it’s close to their downtown jobs. A Whole Foods just opened a few blocks away.

“The beautiful thing about this play is that we hear the same arguments twice,” Buchacker said. “The people may have changed, but the arguments are still the same. The questions are still the same.”

And the answers are still nowhere in sight. Norris wrote the play’s first draft in 2006 and tweaked a few details after the first African-American family moved into the White House. But for all the talk of a “post-racial America,” the conversation has in many ways become more tangled.

Writing for New York magazine, reviewer Frank Rich listed a few of the racial controversies that have flared up on President Obama’s watch: the arrest of the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.; the ousting of the black U.S. Department of Agriculture worker Shirley Sherrod (by Secretary Tom Vilsack, who later offered her a new job), and the killing in Florida of the black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

“America seems more obsessed with race than ever, if less honest about it,” Rich wrote.

He added that in writing the play, Norris set out to “prod those of us who have tended to be starry-eyed about Obama’s breakthrough into conducting a reality check. He reminds us that America has a long way to go before it gets anywhere near its promised nirvana of racial reconciliation, if it ever does.”

“Clybourne Park” borrows its title from the fictional neighborhood in Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play from 1959, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which borrows its own title from a poem by Langston Hughes. In it he asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / Like a raisin in the sun?”

Hughes ended the verse with a scenario that seems to play out in the new play.